Ethylene oxide is manufactured worldwide in amounts of several million tons per year. It can be prepared in large quantities by oxidizing ethylene with air or pure oxygen over a suitable catalyst, for example a silver-containing catalyst, at elevated temperature (e.g., one hundred (100) degrees Celsius (° C.) to five hundred (500)° C.) and at superatmospheric pressure (e.g., two (2) to twenty-five (25) atmospheres (atms)) whereby ethylene and oxygen react to form ethylene oxide.
The ethylene oxide production reactor effluent, which can include ethylene oxide, unconverted ethylene and oxygen, carbon dioxide, aldehydes, other low molecular weight hydrocarbons, and fixed gases such as argon and nitrogen, can be treated with water to remove the ethylene oxide. The ethylene oxide can then be further refined into a form with sufficient purity for industrial applications from the resulting mixture of ethylene oxide and water.